Oscars 2011 Predictions: Another Perspective [INFOGRAPHIC]

Who will take home the hardware tonight at the Oscars 2011 awards ceremony? Here’s another perspective, leveraging the power of social media to find out which actors and films were talked about most, this time in an infographic created by the Meltwater Group.

This infographic confirms most of what we saw yesterday in that Webtrends pre-Oscar buzz graphic, with a notable exception.

The methodologies for the two graphics were similar, where for this graphic, the Meltwater Group started tracking three award categories (Best Picture, Actor and Actress) back on January 25, gathering data from blogs, comments, video, Facebook, and microblogs such as Twitter to arrive at this data. Meltwater went further, cross-checking back to January 20, “to make sure the conversation was generally about the nominee in relation to the Oscars.”

Meltwater admits that “The most talked-about nominees are not necessarily going to be the ones who are named the winners by the Academy,” saying that it is presenting its data as more of a fun way to see which films and actors are being talked about the most.

Webtrends’ data collection differed from Meltwater’s, even though both admit that this more of a popularity contest than a predictor of winners. Webtrends counted both English- and Spanish-language mentions of films or actors, and didn’t count video in its data gathered. However, it had Inception taking the win for Best Picture with The King’s Speech trailing far behind in seventh place.

The other two categories were remarkably similar, where Webtrends matched the Meltwater estimate of James Franco winning the Oscar for Best Actor, as well as Natalie Portman taking on the trophy for Best Actress.

Why do you think there was such a discrepancy between the Best Picture nominees, even though the methodologies of the two studies were similar?